Table of Contents
The best artificial intelligence tools for writers
Tools powered by artificial intelligence (AI) are changing the way we write and edit content, including fiction and non-fiction books. From story and character development to copy editing, AI platforms can provide a helping hand to anyone writing a book.
Thanks to these tools, an author can beat the dreaded writer’s block using assistive writing features or speed up the editing process with automated functions that improve clarity and style. And in academic writing, students and scholars can harness the huge processing power of AI to gather information and citations from myriad sources when writing articles, essays and dissertations.
While texts entirely produced by artificial intelligence can’t compete with those created by humans in terms of originality, sensibility and depth, they can provide a great source of ideas for expanding creativity and improving productivity. For example, they can give suggestions for developing a story idea or plot outline for a book by generating different scenarios, or help to better describe a character or situation. And in general, they can help refine a text with re-writing features that make content less repetitive, more compelling and easier to read.
Today, we’re going to show you a selection of the most useful AI writing tools, together with some practical examples of how they can make a writer’s life easier.
ChatGPT’s Creative Writing Coach
Creative Writing Coach from ChatGPT does what it says on the tin: it gives in-depth feedback on the quality of a piece of creative writing and provides recommendations for improvements.
It analyses ideas and outlines for writing novels or non-fiction, helping to create new storylines and build compelling narratives. Simply enter a short prompt and it will spit out suggestions on how to develop an idea and what language and images to use. It can even write the opening lines.
We asked Creative Writing Coach to help us to develop a children’s story about a talkative and altruistic tree that tries to cheer up everyone it meets. In just seconds, it gave us seven different plot suggestions, all of them convincing and coherent. Using their experience and creativity, a writer could easily flesh out these ideas into something original and engaging.
Jasper
Jasper promises assistance for every writing phase, from plot creation and character development to editing and re-writing. The platform provides suggestions if you’re looking for story inspiration or want to refine grammar, structure, style and tone.
We gave Jasper a spin, asking it to change the writing style used in the opening line to J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. As you can see below, it did a passable job of making the style “more suggestive and emotional”, but you’d be hard pushed to argue it improved on the original.
Another interesting feature is the ability to amend or expand the text it has just generated, for example, by changing the length, tone or format.
In the example below, we asked Jasper to make the tone less emotional: it duly obliged, returning a satisfactory result in mere seconds.
Rytr
Rytr is an AI writing tool that simplifies the whole book creation process, from writing the first draft to developing characters and even rewriting the manuscript. With over use 40 cases, the platform can adapt texts to suit different styles and genres, helping users work with a variety of content types. It can even check a text’s originality with its plagiarism checker.
We asked Rytr to pen three different versions of a humorous poem about a woman who decides to turn her garden into a jungle. The first was unconvincing, with its nonsensical opening line and odd word choices (“bold and bright” seeds?!).
The third version is better, though the image of sunglass-wearing squirrels swinging from vines is a bit over the top, even for a humorous poem. Which goes to show that AI performance can vary wildly from one text type to another.
We also gave the Story Plot function a go, asking Rytr to provide a story idea, written in a worried tone of voice, about woman who decided to quit her job and move to another continent to start a new life.
The result is fluent but melodramatic and full of hackneyed imagery and phraseology. Getting it up to publishable standard would take a fair amount of editing and re-writing.
Jenni
Jenni is a multilingual platform for creating academic and professional content in a range of fields. Features such as the Sentence & Paragraph Expander help writers, scholars, bloggers and students overcome creative block, while Paraphrase & Rewrite lets them quickly recast content but maintain its meaning. Jenni can even include citations from sources or documents uploaded by the user, and employ in their style of choice (APA, Chicago, Harvard etc.).
This richly featured tool helps with the drafting process by refining style and content, and preventing plagiarism. In our test, we asked Jenni to draft an essay on the role of AI in fiction and non-fiction writing. It gave us three fluid but bland opening paragraphs, as well as the option to add relevant citations from its vast library.
Overall, Jenni was intuitive to use and packed with functionality for writing essays, white papers and blog posts.
Sudowrite
Sudowrite is an AI platform explicitly aimed at fiction writers. Designed to help with the entire creative process, it offers a set of highly advanced tools. Let’s have a look at few.
The Describe function lets you add sensorial depth to a word or phrase, providing responses for each of the five senses (sight, sound, touch, taste and smell), as well as metaphors. Rewrite allows you to rephrase sections of the text to, say, add more dialogue or adapt it to a different narrative style. And Story Bible brings together all the key elements of a story into a single interface to simplify the development process.
When we tested this last feature, we were stunned at the level of personalisation and interaction offered: it guides the user through every step of the writing process, from synopsis to scene drafting, using intuitive and flexible tools that help ensure style and content consistency between different narrative elements. For instance, Braindump (in other words, the initial idea) directly influences the creation of synopses, just as the choice of literary genre shapes the plot and individual chapters.
That wraps up our overview of the most useful AI tools for writers: we hope this technology boosts your creativity and productivity!